A Win For Irrationality

Sam Swift

Oct 12, 2017

Imagine a person who always, in every circumstance, makes rational decisions with his money. He saves when he ought to and spends exactly as he should spend, in order to maximize the “utility” of whatever wealth he happens to possess. He defers gratification with ease. When he invests, he has instant and total access to all possible information related to every item in his, including the details of every company’s financials and any impactful world events, even if they haven’t reached the news media yet. If he found a $100 bill on the sidewalk, he would immediately go out and invest it in a steel mill.

Most of us have never met a person like that, but this is how most economists, when they build their models, assume that normal humans behave. All of us—and especially professional financial planners—know that these assumptions are far from what we see in the real world, which makes us question whatever economists tell us about group behavior like the financial and economic markets, laws and regulation, or what consumers will do next.

All of this is why a silent cheer went up around the professional investing world when University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Thaler spent his entire career exploring the differences between these unrealistically idealized economic assumptions and actual human behavior. He demonstrated that people take mental short-cuts—called “heuristics”—when they make what they believe to be logical decisions. He showed that in the real world, their decisions are often impulsive, and self-control is more of an aspiration than a reality.

Thaler also developed a theory of “mental accounting,” which explained how people make financial decisions by creating separate accounts in their minds—one for college funding, say, and another for retirement, and still another for vacations or a new car. He explored those mental short-cuts and found that people tend to expect more in the future of what they’ve recently experienced (recency bias) and uncomfortably often they believe themselves to have more knowledge about their decisions than they actually do.

An experiment with a lost ticket uncovered the “sunk cost” effect. Thaler found that if people purchased a $100 opera ticket and lost it on the way to the show, they would be unlikely to buy another ticket, reasoning that $200 was too much to pay. But if we were perfectly logical, the only choice upon approaching the ticket counter should be whether it was actually worth $100 to hear the opera, and we had already made that decision when we bought the first ticket.

This is actually the second time that the Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to behavioral theorists who strayed from the economic party line. Daniel Kahneman won the prize in 2002 for his work with fellow psychologist Amos Tversky on human behavioral biases and systematic irrational behaviors.

Several of these behavioral biases should be familiar to many of us—overconfidence, familiarity (having a portfolio over-concentrated in a company you know), self-attribution (taking credit for positive outcomes and deflecting blame for negative ones), recency (mentioned earlier), and herd fever (the fear of missing out on cocktail party conversations—think tech stocks in the late 90’s). Thaler’s Nobel confirms that the economics profession is starting to realize that we are not perfectly rational beings and that comes with major ramifications.

The best thing you can do for your own financial well-being is to be aware that you, like all of us, are not a perfectly rational being. Recognizing when emotion and bias are starting to infect your decision making is the first major step to avoiding big mistakes along your journey.

Spend 20 minutes with us.

Every client journey begins with a conversation. To discover whether TCI is a good fit for your financial planning needs, call us to schedule a quick, completely free, low-risk call with an advisor. It’s that easy, seriously!

You are about to leave TCIWealth.com.

You (the “Client”) are leaving the TCI Wealth Advisors (TCI) website and going to TCI’s Client Portal, which is a separate site hosted by Tamarac, Inc. (the “Portal Host”). The Portal Host designed and maintains this site, which posts information provided by TCI and other third parties (the “Content”). The Portal Host is responsible for the maintenance and security of the Content. Client understands that the Portal Host has made its best effort to ensure that its service is uninterrupted, error free and completely secure, but neither TCI nor the Portal Host warrant same. Your use of the Content is provided for your convenience, is being accessed at your own risk, and is being made available to you on an “AS IS” and “AS AVAILABLE” basis. The Content is believed to be reliable but we do not guarantee the completeness, timeliness, sequence, accuracy, or adequacy of the Content, and do not represent or warrant results to be obtained from its use or that the Content contains sufficient information by itself to be the basis for sound investment decisions. To the full extent permitted under applicable law, TCI expressly disclaims all warranties of any kind, whether expressed or implied INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, ACCURACY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. No endorsement of third party products, services or information is expressed or implied by any Content. Under no circumstances should any of the Content be construed as an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy a particular security. Consumers are encouraged to read the privacy policies of websites reached through the use of links from the TCI website and the Client Portal.